Conspiracy : James Martel

If we keep this technique in mind, it enables us to return to the Discourses themselves and read a kind of double language or practice of adianoeta there as well. Our initial reading of the text as being potentially conspiratorial can be enhanced by thinking of Machiavelli as engaging in a coded discourse where one set of readers (elites, the Medici or other enemies) might be appeased or misled by certain statements in the text, while other readers who were more “in the know,” might read it far more subversively.

Thus, for example, we can read some comments Machiavelli makes about the need to resort to fraud and deception in a new (conspiratorial) light. In Chapter XIII, Machiavelli tells us “I believe it to be most true that it seldom happens that men rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud.”¹² He goes on to describe how all the great leaders of both antiquity and his own times resort to fraud, including such luminaries as Philip of Macedon and Cyrus.

Machiavelli then states: “that which princes are obliged to do in the beginning of their rise [i.e. deceive], republics are equally obliged to practice.”¹³ Seemingly then, Machiavelli is saying that republics–and popular movements more generally–have to resort to the same devices as princes. It would seem as if fraud and force are critical to obtain and hold power. If this is the case, all popular forms of politics are condemned to the same tricks as that employed by princes and, in this way, the public will almost always be the loser insofar as princes will always be more adept, more cunning than any collectivity.

Yet if we read Machiavelli as advocating for conspiracy, however subtly, we can read him differently. What is “fraud” for princes is “adianoeta” for the public. Whereas the princes are tarred in a sense with their own deception, the people are practicing something different, a form of knowledge that is rooted in their own plurality. At one point in the Discourses, Machiavelli writes that although the prince and the people share the same fallible human nature:

I say that the people are more prudent and stable, and have better judgment than a prince; and it is not without good reason that it is said, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God;’ for we see popular opinion prognosticate in such a wonderful manner that it would almost seem as if the people had some occult virtue, which enables them to foresee the good and the evil . . . And if occasionally they are misled in matters involving questions of courage or seeming utility . . . so is a prince also many times misled by his own passions, which are much greater than those of the people.¹⁴

In this way we see that the private, venal perspective of the prince is what condemns him. He is made of the same human material as the people but his own limited access to information, his placing of his own interest and perspective over all others (reinforced by his limited access), condemns him in a way that the people avoid. The technique of adianoeta can be said to reflect this difference.

Although it can be difficult to translate Machiavelli’s Renaissance mores and techniques into modern contexts, we can nonetheless see that Machiavelli’s treatment of conspiracies not only describes, but potentially produces a different politics, a set of techniques and exclusions that are rooted in the phenomenology of plurality.

4. Hobbes’s Conspiracy of Readers

Turning next to Thomas Hobbes, he might seem to be a uniquely unlikely person to look to as a left conspirator insofar as his reputation is almost universally one of being very conservative, a key producer of the status quo. Yet to think this may be to confuse the order that Hobbes helped to produce with the way that Hobbes was understood in his own time. While he was alive, Hobbes was indeed considered very conspiratorial, and dangerous. Leviathan was in particular attacked as leading to atheism and anarchy, the latter charge being almost unimaginable from a contemporary perspective.¹⁵ No less than Leo Strauss himself, sees Hobbes as being “persecuted” and writing in a code to elude the attention of those who wished him ill.¹⁶

It may, therefore, be allowed that Hobbes can be read as writing esoterically or conspiratorially but it seems harder to argue that Hobbes can be read in a particularly leftist manner. Wasn’t his conspiracy, if we can call it that, aimed at ensuing a future liberal order? Isn’t the crowning achievement of his work the promulgation of an indisputable basis of authority for political sovereignty? Yet, once we allow that there may be more than one way to read Leviathan–among other works–we invite the possibility of reading the text even in ways that the author himself may or may not have intended. This is because of a peculiarity of many of Hobbes’ work and especially Leviathan, namely the fact that these texts engage directly with the question of textual authority. In a long running analogy that Hobbes makes throughout Leviathan, there is a correspondence between his own role as author of the book and the authority of the sovereign over a political community. Insofar as much of Leviathan serves to instruct his readers to question and even challenge his own textual authority (as I will attempt to show), it also may invite us to question and challenge the authority of the sovereign as well (even if this is not Hobbes’ original intention).¹⁷ Thus, to read Hobbes in this way is to read him as having an interpretive method which is radical even if the politics he espouses are not. It is to suggest that Hobbes can be read both in a conspiratorial fashion and even as a fellow conspirator himself. Let me explain further how this works.

^{12. Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 318.↩}

^{13. Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 319.↩}

^{14. Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 264.↩}

^{15. For more on this see, for example, A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Miriam Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977); John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951).↩}

^{16. Strauss “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” 499. See also his The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).↩}

^{17. I discuss this at greater length in Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). ↩}